2026
The Deterministic Horizon: When Extended Reasoning Fails and Tool Delegation Becomes Necessary
ICML 2026poster
Extended chain-of-thought reasoning can degrade performance on deterministic state-tracking tasks—not due to preference biases, but fundamental information-theoretic limits in decoder-only transformers. We establish: (1) an Attention Bottleneck Theorem with matching lower bound, proving state-tracki…